Promotie Peter Vankov op 5 november

22 oktober 2008

PhD defense Peter Vankov on his study of the B-meson lifetime and the performance of the Outer Tracker at LHCb

The LHCb experiment studies the particle-antiparticle asymmetry using B-mesons. Peter Vankov worked on a Dutch part of the LHCb detector, the Outer Tracker system. He studied the overall performance of this detector as shown during the quality and beam tests of the LHC. Vankov will defend his thesis on the fifth of November at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva requires high performance detectors. One of the four, major LHC experiments is the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb). It is a dedicated B-physics experiment for precision measurements of CP violation in the B-meson system and for studying rare B decays.

In order to efficiently reconstruct the trajectories of charged particles, LHCb is equipped with an Outer Tracker (OT) system, consisting of gaseous straw tube detectors. The OT system comprises three stations each consisting of multiple layers of wires in vertical and non-vertical orientation. Basic unit of the stations is the OT module — a self-contained gas-detector unit filled with a counting gas mixture.

The outer tracker module production was carefully monitored by a variety of tests, forming the quality assurance and commissioning of the detector. The overall performance of the outer tracker detector as shown during the quality and beam tests is one of the topics Vankov studied in his dissertation.

The second part of the dissertation is a research on the B-meson lifetimes at LHCb. The lifetimes τB+ and τB0 of B+ and B0 mesons are extracted in a simulation study, using the B+ → J/Ψ K+ and B0 → J/Ψ K* decay modes. The LHCb sensitivity to the ratio τB+/τB0, is defined. This ratio can be used as a probe for validating the Heavy Quark Expansion model.

Peter Vankov, Study of the B-Meson Lifetime and the Performance of the Outer Tracker at LHCb.
Promoter: prof.dr.ing. J.F.J. van den Brand; Copromoteren: dr. A. Pellegrino, dr. H.G. Raven

The defense is foreseen for Wednesday 05.11.2008 at 10:45 am in the aula of Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam.
Contact: peter.vankov@cern.ch